[jlouis]

A fun idea is to do away with the "guild" servers in the architecture and simply run message passes from the websocket process over the Manifold system. A little bit of ETS work should make this doable and now an eager sending process is paying for the work itself, slowing it down. This is exactly the behavior you want. If you are bit more sinister you also format most of the message in the sending process and makes it into a binary. This ensures data is passed by reference and not copied in the system. It ought to bring message sends down to about funcall overhead if done right.

It is probably not a solution for current Discord as they rely on linearizability, but I toyed with building an IRCd in Erlang years ago, and there we managed to avoid having a process per channel in the system via the above trick.

As for the "hoops you have to jump through", it is usually true in any language. When a system experiences pressure, how easy it is to deal with that pressure is usually what matters. Other languages are "phase shifts" and while certain things become simpler in that language, other things become much harder to pull off.

[mononcqc]

The true evil approach is to send the socket around, not the message, so that there is no copying required no matter what ;)

[rdtsc]

Wah. Easy there, Satan :-)

That is cool trick though. So it's basically sending the port itself around and changing its ownership, with something like port_connect(Port,NewOwner)?

And btw, thank you for writing https://www.erlang-in-anger.com and http://learnyousomeerlang.com !

[mononcqc]

The trick is more commonly used when writing to sockets. A socket owner is required for reading, not for writing.

The trick then is that when you need to write lots of data to a socket to just send a copy of it to the writer so they can dump all their data for cheap, but without changing ownership (which is costly).

Also recently I've gotten http://propertesting.com/ out, you might enjoy it :)

[rdtsc]

Thanks for explaining. I'll have to remember the socket trick.

> Also recently I've gotten http://propertesting.com/ out, you might enjoy it :)

It might be just what I need to understand and start using property tests. I've tried twice and gave up.

Oh and recon! Thanks for that too. Use it almost every day.